ANNE

As I wrote in an earlier post, Moose Lake is the former State Hospital for the Insane, built in 1936. “Early treatments used there included insulin and electroshock, hydrotherapy, and physiotherapy. In the 1950s lobotomies were used on some patients.” As you can probably tell from the stilted writing here, this is taken off a historical document; I always assume things were at least twice as worse as described in historical documents.

“When the Sandstone State Hospital closed in 1959, its program for inebriates [Inebriates! I love it.] was transferred to Moose Lake. By 1961, treatment of alcoholism was a specialization of Moose Lake. In 1966 a program for adolescents was begun, in which some of the participants attended public school and gained high school credits. Also in 1966 all of the hospital’s medical/surgical wards were closed.

“The hospital closed as a psychiatric facility in 1995. It has since been owned and operated by the Minnesota Department of Corrections. The facility maintains a small treatment unit for drug/alcohol problems, as well as a sex offender treatment program.”

The name was nice-ified to Moose Lake Regional Treatment Center at that time.

A “total of 1,060 adult offenders are under the Case Responsibility of Minnesota Correctional Facility – Moose Lake with a total of 1,044 adult offenders currently on-site at this facility.”

I won’t throw all the numbers at you; you can look at them yourself if you have nothing better to do. Moose Lake has a slightly older population than St. Cloud, maybe because it’s where they house a lot of sex offenders who are locked up for life.

At St. Cloud, 126 inmates were in for Criminal Sexual Conduct (let’s just call it what it is: rape), average sentence: 106 months. It’s more than double that number at Moose Lake, 271 rapists with an average sentence of 137 months. In case your math isn’t any good, that’s over 11 years.

425 men are in Moose Lake for drug offenses, and the average sentence is 64 months. That’s Vince.

The next category is domestic assault (120 inmates, serving an average of 24 months). Then there’s just regular assault, with 73 inmates serving an average sentence of 54 months.

Other crimes with interesting nomenclature include Crimes against Government, Escape/Fugitive, Counterfeiting/Fraud, and Harassment/Stalking/Bias.

While there was only one murderer at St. Cloud, there are 70 at Moose Lake. So yeah, it’s a bit more of a serious place.

St. Cloud is somewhat more white and Latino, and with fewer Natives and African Americans. Whatever that means, if anything.

I scanned the religion column and saw that 58% were Christian, 3% Muslim, and a third had no preference.  There are 10 pagans, 7 who called themselves “Eastern,” 4 Atheists, and again, as in St. Cloud, one Jew. That must be scary, given what Vince has told me about the Skinheads and the Nation of Islam members talking about how they’d like to kill them some Jews.

Nothing about dwarfs.